Vital dataveillance: investigating data in exchange for vitality through South Korea’s COVID-19 technogovernance

Abstract

Abstract Through a case study of South Korea's tracking infrastructure, this study critically examines new surveillance technologies deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic. I consider the ways that these technologies were widely framed as beneficial and benign, contributing to their widespread acceptance, and normalizing their pervasive and intrusive tracking capacities. By employing cluster criticism analysis of the Korean health authorities' official reports, I argue that Korean health authorities discursively construct their ICT-based tracking infrastructure as democratic technologies of control. They also position Korean citizens as data subjects entitled to the right to know about vitality and caring subjects responsible for the vitality of others through their provision of data, an exchange which this paper terms as vital dataveillance. Through the concept of vital dataveillance, this study illuminates the new types of data governance and data rights of the pandemic.